Zine machine: a compact 3D-printed block printing press | Hacker News Reader

Zine machine: a compact 3D-printed block printing press

hibred.pmvabf.org

247 pointshownottowrite63 comments

It turns out you can put a LOT of force through 3d printer parts if you don't care about getting a lot of cycles. Here's a video from 2018 of 3d printed Press Brake Dies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-fTY5L5uu0

Perhaps there is a way to feed this "press" between a set of rollers to make a harder impression?

I saw someone on YT the other day who basically printed his part with 20% infill and a honeycomb infill pattern, no bottom, then poured epoxy into the honeycomb, and then used the resulting solid 'die' to form sheet metal. Amazing times we live in, where you can do things like that with < $400 total worth of tools from any hardware store.

You can go straight for 0% infill (vasemode).

https://youtu.be/aEoBkH05xGY

Depends on the design, I don't see how one would print the design in the link I posted elsewhere in vase mode - even if it could be made to work, it would be a lot harder for no real purpose.

you want something to keep the perimeters stiff if you care about the dimensions or if the parts aren't this small. The weight of the resin pushes out the walls.

Care to post the link of the video you're talking about?

I spend way too long looking for this, but here it is - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxzqkhmcRlY .

Also depending on loading. Printed parts can be relatively strong under compression but tend to be weak under tension relative to their printed axis. Shear is a mixed bag, it does depend on layer adhesion at that point.

100% infill helps. There’s also a new method of post-print sintering in your oven using powdered salt

> There’s also a new method of post-print sintering in your oven using powdered salt

Here is the salt annealing video: https://youtu.be/nRLJ4ylGTFc

I did work experience when I was in highschool at an old-school printing press with 100yo german made printing machines and I got the opportunity to play with typesetting using real brass. It was pretty cool and massively time-consuming, I love the DIY nature of this I think it would be great for teaching school kids about traditional printing.

When I played with a real printing press, I found the labor-intensive step of setting the type to be relaxing. Once you were proficient at locating the letters from the case, you almost didn't need to think. And no they weren't made of brass, but lead, and you weren't suppose to eat finger foods after typesetting.

You might like Farewell - 1978 https://vimeo.com/127605643

> A film created by Carl Schlesinger and David Loeb Weiss documenting the last day of hot metal typesetting at The New York Times. This film shows the entire newspaper production process from hot-metal typesetting to creating stereo moulds to high-speed press operation. At the end of the film, the new typesetting and photographic production process is shown in contrast to the old ways.

While typesetting is pretty time consuming (I guess?), it was still a massive improvement over copying things by hand; it set the stage for mass production, so setting was done once, but then they could make an infinite amount of copies of anything. Mostly bibles, but still.

Brass? Type has traditionally been made of lead.

You are probably thinking of hot metal typesetting (Linotype, etc). Before that sorts ("types") were made from all kinds of alloys, so "brass" does not sound wrong.

When I was a cold metal typesetter all our factory-bought fonts were lead. Brass was typically use as molds for hot (Linotype) machines.

I made one of these about 8 years ago!

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:113044

Although theirs is a much better execution =)

That was pretty cool, thanks for sharing!

Imagine if we could show Gutenberg what has become of his invention. "We took the printing idea, made it work in 3 dimensions, and now we can print the printing press".

I would imagine he would say, "after 580 years and that's it. Where are the flying horse and buggies?"

Well we do have airplanes and they’re pretty impressive, but also pretty different from a printing press. The ‘where’s my jet pack’ mentality is born out of a very quick pace of progress. The delta from the 600 years prior to Gutenberg is substantially lower than th 509 years after. He would probably be impressed.

The OP’s point about the generality of of modern printing technology is also interesting as it reflects market dynamics. Getting two different fonts on the same document used to be a stretch.

I had several starts to college, and took a lot of English/writing courses across a few schools. I remember they always had a unit on Zines. I never really understood it. I always thought “Why wouldn’t you just put this on the web?” Not really appreciating that everyone wasn’t like me.

This is pretty cool. I tend to think that if you have a computer and images and a 3D printer ups just put it on a website, but then again I’m thinking only of my narrow world view. Sometimes distributing literature needs to grow beyond the digital.

Also sometimes simple tech makes for really interesting engagement

Yup. And there’s just something special about paging through the weird, poorly-photocopied zines that you find at your local anarchist coffeeshop.

You have no control over how something looks like on the web. The screens are not color calibrated, the screen sizes are arbitrary, layouts are not respected by browsers, hell tex is still the best layout engine for text and it's 40 years old.

Really cool ideia, but my comment today goes to Clippy. I thought about using it on my web site, but I was afraid of running into some legal issues. I wrote a pretty decent animation system for it. Did you change the colors of yours to avoid getting into trouble also?

Can't answer for the site operator, but you probably won't get into any kind of legal trouble for anything non a non-profit site, especially since commercial use of "Clippy" stopped over a decade ago.

Are you supposed to customize the letter plate in your slicer before printing? The default plates in the zipfile don't seem well designed for a traditional movable type system. It's 13 full copies of the alphabet, and 3 lines of the most common characters, but even that leaves you with an abundance of X, Z, K, etc... and a relatively modest number of vowels. There doesn't appear to be any capital letters either.

I'm also confused as to the purpose of the "plates stl" directory that has many seemingly very similar blank plates. The "how to make plates" documentation is all about building custom graphical plates.

Amusingly, my slicer is estimating that it would take 28 hours to print the letters and spacers.

3d printing an entire custom graphical plate with text already on it seems more practical in production terms, although of course you would be limited in design terms by the resolution of what you could get out of your printer.

It would be interesting to do 4-color printing on this as well - obviously you would not have fine enough resolution to do a true "screen" but you could do what amount to multicolor woodcuts. Wonder how good the "reproducibility" is, in terms of ensuring that the paper is always accurately aligned/etc. Part of the charm though, I suppose.

Perhaps you could do the block-printing equivalent of "ascii art" and use some pre-printed blocksets which don't correspond to actual characters, but which could be arranged to print some approximation of an image.

Or just ascii art itself although these blocks appear to be fairly big for that.

Pretty neat and fun little idea.

If you used reusable plates as a base - basically a removable 3D printer bed plate - and just printed the raised parts for a plate directly onto it, that would seem like a pretty quick, filament-light way to produce plates that could be used to run off a few copies, before scraping the filament traces off and printing another plate.

I wonder how few layers you could get down to and produce decent results?

You could probably do pretty well with a resin printer. This seems particularly well suited for it

The letters and spacers 3D-print as individual pieces. Rearrange them to form your message and slide them onto rods that snap into the body frame.

With the supplied letters and spacers as examples, render the font of your choice as additional models to 3D-print.

It makes more sense to me to just print a whole plate rather than individual letters. Wasteful, but compared to the normal printing process, really not that wasteful.

Really? That would mean you’d need a plate for every single page. I feel like that would blow through filament.

You can print them pretty thin.

Or maybe print something more ephemeral like how a mimeograph works (or maybe even silk screen)

Collaborator on the zine machine here. Great to see this on HN!

Just as an FYI, we will be hosting a live Q&A this Saturday 1 — 2pm EST. You can find a link to the event in the schedule on the homepage: hibred.pmvabf.org

Any plans to sell pre made kits of this? I'd love to get my girlfriend something like this but I don't have a 3d printer.

Anyone knows what the "nude people dancing" [1] image from the post is called? Or how to call the art-style?

I find it oddly fascinating. Like hieroglyphs and cave-paintings. Or like greek paintings on a vase.

1: https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/84d93e7b90e024156d88...

It's "Dance" by Matisse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_(Matisse)

Thank you very much!

Why not put a lever handle on there so you don't have to push so hard? Use mechanical advantage!

Y'know like a tortilla press: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortilla_press

Because this thing is plastic. It is struggling enough already. There is a reason printers used metal rather than wood blocks.

My suggestion is purely intended to improve ergonomics, not to actually push the device to its breaking point, but I see how that could be a problem.

Wood is pretty common for type, especially poster sizes, and there are some hobbyists still who use it for engravings

Of course, the Chinese predecessor of the Gutenberg press used wooden blocks.

Unfortunately this doesn’t include the coolest part of this kind of press, the Linotype steam powered automatic typesetter.

Any plans to sell kits for us suckers who don't have 3d printers? I'd buy one right now.

Awesome. This goes on my "technology to have for when society collapses" list.

Just don't forget to keep your strategic reserve of all the fab-made components 3D printer is built of.

And an electric generator, tons of filament stores in giant ZipLoc bags, guns to protect your "free press", etc...

Well you simply print the guns and 3d printer parts. It's the power source stable enough to not interrupt long prints that's a pain.

thought this was going to be 3d printing in blocks, but this is cool too.

This looks great, so many opportunities for artists.

this is cool. I wonder what would motivate someone to do this over typewriting and photocopying to get same effect.

There's a kind of process-fetishism that runs through every branch of creative craft.

For example some writers like Neil Gaiman love their fountain pens:

https://www.notebookstories.com/2020/02/20/neil-gaiman-on-no...

> process-fetishism

I've not heard it put so succinctly before.

Thanks :)

I'm a craftsman/artist myself and it's taken this particular post to crystalline a life time of observation about fellow artists. Myself I couldn't give two shakes about how to get something done. But I've met plenty of fellows, at every level of production (more so at freshman levels because this kind of fetishism leads to less actual production being done as the fast and easy way is usually the less sexy way), that are gung ho about a certain verisimilitude process wise. For them, it seems to me, they don't think it's an honest or 'real' work unless it's done with a certain technique.

Well, it wouldn't be the same effect. Similar, sure—but e.g. laser printing looks different from physically pressing an inked plate against a piece of paper. For one thing, you have the physical act of pressing; for another, you have different kinds of ink, and can do things like mix a color before you print instead of getting a bunch of CMYK dots.

The difference is often subtle. But sometimes, it can be striking.

You can get cool textures with alternative printing techniques. The inks used in printmaking are also very pigmented, so you get very rich colors/blacks, as well as some pigments you wouldn't get in a typewriter (e.g. dayglo colors)

The creative process isnt just the end result, but also the process and medium.

as they say, sometimes it’s about the journey rather than the destination.

Fuck typewriter. Use a typewriter font and laser printer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com